


light pollution as a self-portrait

by nanodarlings (incendiarism)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Character Death, Gunshot Wounds, Homophobia, Lee Donghyuck | Haechan-centric, M/M, Multi, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Linear Narrative, Trauma, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:22:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22028512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incendiarism/pseuds/nanodarlings
Summary: Littering Donghyuck’s skin are crimson-cut and ghostly-pale lines—some jagged, some even, but all making his body out to be a wasteland of scars. As if someone had taken the lines on his palm and extended upon that theme, rippled them out until he became a simple canvas for all the most violent administrations. A convenient map drawn in permanent ink, displaying all the countless injuries he’s sustained over the years.Donghyuck is just another veteran, one faceless soldier among thousands.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Lee Jeno/Na Jaemin, Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Comments: 25
Kudos: 66





	light pollution as a self-portrait

**Author's Note:**

> hello hello, welcome to light pollution! this fic is...my monster child? writing this has been an absolutely journey for sure.
> 
> first and foremost, endless love and gratitude goes towards blair for betaing this for me and tolerating my screeching! this fic would be nowhere near as coherent without their feedback. i love them to the moon and back.
> 
> second of all, here's a [list](https://hereinevitably.dreamwidth.org/1906.html) of my various sources of inspiration! a lot of these completely changed my writing + my outlook on life in general, so please please check them out.
> 
> finally, thank you for clicking! i hope you enjoy! :DD

“In the square below: a nun, on fire,

runs silently toward her god—

 _Open_ , he says.

She opens.”

\- Aubade with Burning City, Lines 48-51, Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Today is a new day.

Donghyuck is stood at the entrance of his apartment, weight perched on the balls of his feet, waiting for something that’s not quite there yet. Waiting, one hand outstretched over the doorknob, the other buried in the pocket of his jacket.

His fingers twitch from where they’re hovered, a small, subtle movement as he closes his eyes for a moment. It’s not here yet.

He opens the door with a scan of his fingerprint and steps in, the heels of his shoes clicking softly against the floor. The door shuts behind him. He breathes in the scent of dust and disuse, counts to three, and then breathes out, quiet, muted, and finds his way around again.

With his coat hung up in the closet by the door and his boots placed neatly on the shoe rack, he marvels at how untouched his apartment seems, how normal. If someone were to try hard enough, he could almost be convinced that he’s only returning from running errands: a trip to the grocery store or a visit to the doctor’s. The entire place is immaculate, uncomfortably so, and it raises a disjointed feeling in the back of his head.

Like he’d spent the past few years as an actor, shoehorned into a role and made to live it out, and this is his plunge back into his own skin. Tilt shift, retrograde—flung back to three-dimensions after being collapsed into a flat existence.

Expansion requires there to be mass at the ready to round out the new space, otherwise the object is left hollow and fragile, easily breakable in its lack of substance. Donghyuck is home in the sense that his body lies here, but what about the rest?

It’s only when he’s in the shower that the full weight of realization hits, crushing his windpipe and hooking up into his diaphragm. Freight train, thunderous in its inertia, unavoidable in its approach. Realization welcomes him home, smothers him into its bony grasp. Impact, followed by the click into the mindset that it’s all over. No more war. He can finally bury the damn thing.

He supposes that this is it, this is being back. 

The water falls on him in rivulets, falls on him in blades between his shoulders, and he thinks that he could probably drown like this without a second thought. He finds himself turning the heat up all the way, making it scalding hot in a pipe-dream attempt at comfort, and he studies himself underneath the cover of soap and suds.

Littering Donghyuck’s skin are crimson-cut and ghostly-pale lines—some jagged, some even, but all making his body out to be a wasteland of scars. As if someone had taken the lines on his palm and extended upon that theme, rippled them out until he became a simple canvas for all the most violent administrations. A convenient map drawn in permanent ink, displaying all the countless injuries he’s sustained over the years.

Donghyuck feels dirty. He feels used.

The war is over, so all he can do is wring his hands and wonder what more is there left to him. Pretense washes down the drain, leaving him naked. Picked clean and taken apart, robbed of his masquerade myopia, he stands under the gushing stream of water, hands moving mechanically. 

Now they scrub at his arms, now he thinks about the first time he ever drew blood. Now they move to his chest, now he feels his pounding heart against his rib-cage. Now they run through his scalp, now he turns inconsolable.

Strip away his flesh, his sinew and bone, lay him out bare and empty: all you’ll be left with are scraps of metal and manufactured bravado. 

Donghyuck learns on his first day back home that he’s no longer a fan of showers.

— 

Re-adjustment is a clumsy process. Re-adjustment is learning to walk on a brand-new set of legs, except sometimes the legs betray the owner and run in the opposite of the intended direction, sometimes the legs buckle sporadically.

(Though, Donghyuck was at least lucky enough to escape becoming an amputee. He can count his blessings for that.)

There are the nightmares that plague his sleep, tar steeped dreams running wild in a caged mind, but they’re the ones everyone is warned about. In broad daylight however, there are also the daily inflictions of trauma, common as the specks of dust floating around his apartment. An invisible hand hovering over the trigger: it pulls, and Donghyuck reacts.

Shellshock.

He thought that he’d have been done with minefields now, but it seems that some things are just inescapable once you’re exposed to them. 

Exhibit A:

The beeping of the microwave, the one that bears an eerie resemblance to the sound of someone’s comm getting disconnected, becomes his number one enemy. It’s a knee-jerk thing; the mechanical shrieking is an automatic signal to fall into frenzy, the metronomic blare warrants a reaction synonymous to enemy fire. But here’s the catch: the only way Donghyuck was taught to deal with his enemies was to shoot, but he’s not the one with the gun here. He’s the one swallowing the bullet, and the trigger is the one swallowing him whole.

It’s not a fact that he’s particularly proud of, the way something as small as a microwave can have him scrambling in a millisecond. But pride goes out the window when danger registers, when reality careens out of focus and he finds himself braced against the counter, teeth gritted together and memories pooling at his feet.

Three. Two. One—

Cover your head and brace for impact.

— 

On the first day of boot camp, he’s brought to a room tucked away in an endless maze of corridors. It’s a small holding cell, claustrophobic and shockingly blank. Pristine. Removed. The two stone-faced men that had come to fetch Donghyuck sit him down in a chair placed in the middle of the room, and then they leave him there without uttering a single word.

Everything about the space seems to be designed to numb, from the empty walls to the blank tile to the suffocating silence. Donghyuck sits still, spine held ramrod straight and hands carefully folded together in his lap, and he wonders if he’s dreaming, if he’s going to jerk awake at any moment and find himself back in his room at home, the sounds of his mother making breakfast and his father watching the news trickling in through the door.

The moment never comes.

Instead, a pair of mechanical arms extend from a panel that opens up from the wall. Attached to one of its claw-like hands is a protruding needle, stark against a wash of white. The other hand is empty, and it immediately latches onto Donghyuck. And now he’s restrained.

Donghyuck has a private revolution against the urge to scream as the needle moves closer and closer, telling himself to not give in, until it finally pierces his arm. Donghyuck loses his private revolution. It’s not the needle itself that causes him to start thrashing, but rather whatever’s in it that turns his veins into wires and shoots lightning through them.

He finds out—after the fact of course—that they’d drugged him with fear serum. For test purposes, they say, to gauge how he would perform in a high pressure situation. Artificial and soul-searing terror, packaged into a single syringe. He is taught what it feels like to have the rib-cage laced together, invisible ribbon weaving around the lungs and tying tightly across the heart, and he is taught the steely pressure of being bound by fears that he can’t even see. 

His hands twitch when it happens, wishing to fly up to his chest to undo the knot, fingers picking and pulling until they wear raw and red. But his wish is to no avail: the rope constricts and the body compresses and the claw grips tighter and tighter, and all Donghyuck can do is play a waiting game until the drugs wear off and hope he doesn’t end up unsalvageable. 

They tell him that it's a one time thing when it’s over. They're liars.

Administered fear has become the newest, most effective development in weaponry. Donghyuck’s side of the war knows this. So does the enemy’s. 

(The advancement of technology doesn’t make war any less deadly. Just neater. Quieter.)

His third assignment, he doesn't get his gas-mask on in time as their unit gets caught out into the open. His sixth, a dart filled with the stuff catches him in the neck. It happens again and again: his eighth, his fourteenth, until one incident crumbles into another, until he loses track. And everytime, he’s left with a heartbeat far too high to be human, a sore throat, and a feeling of worthlessness that he can’t seem to shake. 

Because it turns out that simulated alarm isn't the sort of thing that you can get used to, at least not fully. It turns out that your heart will always jump when it's told, your muscles will always seize when they're instructed. It turns out that Donghyuck is programed to follow orders at a moment's notice, but unfortunately his body was never taught which were the right ones.

—

Day Six of Not Showering, A Log:

Donghyuck is in bed, again, buried underneath his covers and probably swimming in his own filth at this point. He counts the seconds as they tick by, he counts the sounds of passing cars. He tries very, very hard to empty his brain. He tries to spend more time asleep than he spends awake, preferring the autonomy of nightmares to thinking.

Thinking is a dangerous thing. The government knows this, it’s why they condition their soldiers to become mindless and obedient. Donghyuck knows this now as well. Thinking is like a wildfire—unpredictable and messy and grotesque.

Thinking leads to this horrible fear inside of Donghyuck, an ugly and abrasive little beast curled up in his mind. It's a different sort of fear from the serum. This one is alive; this one has teeth and claws and has dug its home right in between his temples. It’s a spoiled and demanding monster, awfully prone to sudden tantrums, and in its cage it wails—

Donghyuck is scared that inside, he’s rotten and hopeless. Donghyuck is scared that inside, he doesn't remember what it's like to feel human.

—

Ten months after he’s discharged, he becomes acquainted with Jaemin. 

He’s at a cafe, having decided to go outside for lunch in a moment of uncharacteristic boldness. It’s one of those rundown, hole-in-the-wall places, the type with menus still printed on paper, the type that would probably fail at least a few health inspections if anyone were to care enough to check. And he’s sitting in a corner staring at the myriad of scars bolting across Jaemin’s exposed skin, gathered around the crook of his elbow.

He knows them intrinsically; he could trace over their sprawling paths with his eyes closed—he has a distorted mirror version branded on his own body after all. They’re signs of last minute, rushed steroids taken on the field, dangerous bodily enhancements that were never made to be taken in such high dosages all at once. But when it comes down to snap decisions, the needle thin line between life and death, desperation does wonders for limitations. A few botched injection sites are better than being dead. Right?

_Right?_

Right. They’re survivors. They’re the lucky ones.

(Donghyuck would do well to keep this in mind.)

His eyes follow the line of Jaemin’s arm up to meet his face, as if magnetized. Jaemin is waiting for him, watching him curiously. Donghyuck tilts his head, a subtle acknowledgement that asks _oh, you too?_ Jaemin’s eyebrows lift, and he removes his face mask to give a half smile before approaching Donghyuck and sitting down in front of him.

Memory is a living, breathing thing. Memory is constantly in motion; memory is constantly sparking motion through its catapulting and capsizing. In this way, when two people exchange memories, movement is seen. In this way, when two people exchange memories, momentum is felt.

At first it’s a bit awkward, as the past etches out its boundaries through its vehicle of words and learns where to stop and where to push. But they settle down into a rhythm as they speak to each other, and once they’ve fallen in sync they find themselves talking for a miniaturized eternity, inertia carrying them forward in their sentences.

It becomes a painting made up of their shared recollection. Brushes dipped into old memories that never got closure—the ones that always felt like they needed a proper send-off instead of being left to rot inside, bits and pieces made up of past tense. Strokes of _do you remember? Do you remember? You must remember, you’re all they have now,_ that they send to each other. It’s liberating to spill his guts to a complete stranger, in a way that he hasn’t felt since Mark.

( _Do you remember?_ )

Donghyuck leaves hours later, feeling lighter than he has in months, one more contact added to his hologram. Jaemin’s face lights up and dances across the projection on his skin, weaving through his own lines like they’re a maze.

—

Sometimes he's put on the other side of the equation. Sometimes he's the one with the bomb in the palm of his hand, sometimes he's the one who gets to watch the panic flood into widening eyes before he takes aim and fires. He finds that some people take it better than others, he observes: there are the ones who get paralyzed, there are the ones who try to fight it off, and there are the ones who fall, good as dead.

Sitting ducks. Ready to be picked off.

It’s not a pleasant experience; a bit of Donghyuck grimaces every time he hears the explosion and the resounding chaos that ensues. But it could always be worse, he reminds himself, he could be in enemy lines instead. He could be the one dying. 

Remorse is useless in this game of faceless soldiers and dispensable pawns: this has been drilled into Donghyuck by his training from the very first week. _Run,_ it orders. _Don’t look back, ever._ But remorse is such a _mundane_ thing, and mundane is something he oh so longs for—so he tells himself, carefully, to remember to take a moment and feel sorry for those who aren’t as lucky as him. 

He’s never been much of a religious man, but he prays for the dead nonetheless, the closest thing he can spare to an apology. He prays for them, and he silently wishes that someone will do the same for his own sinner of a soul when it’s his turn to go.

—

His relationship with Jaemin is a peculiar one, built on shared experiences and shaped by empathy. The second time they meet, they retrace their steps and go over basic facts, ones they’d jumped over in favor of talking about all the grittier nuances.

Donghyuck finds out that Jaemin had been stationed across the country from him, that he’d been in one of the bases located far underground. That half of his body had been blasted to bits and replaced with metal modifications. He finds out that Jaemin’s favorite color is pink, that he works at a library now, telling stories to children and hanging on to some of the last remnants of a more civil world. And he finds that Jaemin has the most broken taste buds of anyone he’s ever encountered. 

“Look, I know this entire city has its whole ‘everything is neon from all the experimental residue’ aesthetic going on, but I’m pretty sure coffee isn’t supposed to _glow_?”

“Oh, fuck you dear Donghyuck, let me have the little things in life.”

— 

In Donghyuck’s personal, understated opinion, people who call war an art form are pretentious bastards and have most likely never even stepped foot on a battlefield before.

(At the end of the day though, what does he know? He’s just another one of the staggering amount of veterans at this point, one face among an army. Jaded and bitter beyond belief, but no one special. No one revolutionary. A kid that needs to get a number, wait in line with the rest of the masses.)

But take a step back and indulge the labels for a second, take a step back and call war an art. The people who choose to shove it in that box have gotten at least one thing right—if war is an art, it’s a time art, like music or dance or film. All time arts have the potential to be memory arts, have the potential to utilize the power of recollection. And damn him all the way down to hell, if war isn’t the most powerful memory art he’s ever experienced, if war isn’t chasing a rabbit down a rabbit hole in his mind every day.

At the mercy of gravity, he has no choice but to fall.

As a kid, Donghyuck used to dream about being an artist—a singer in particular. We all know where the story goes from there.

— 

Meeting Renjun feels a lot like deja-vu. Different set, different costumes, but same plot and same script.

Scene start: Donghyuck is walking through the fluorescent aisles of the supermarket that’s located ten minutes away from his home by bus. As he wanders through the shelves, trying to remember how much coffee he has left at home, he spots Renjun out of the corner of his eye reaching for a box of jasmine tea. He sees him for a frame, and then does a double take— 

It’s the scars. Always the scars.

Renjun catches him staring and calls him out on it—guard up, defenses raised. There’s a split-second analysis that follows, the two of them sizing up each other for compatibility, for any signs of threat, before something releases. _This is not an enemy,_ it says softly, _you are safe._

The gun in the hands of the pacifist loses its power. The gun is not what is innately the weapon, but rather the intention behind it and the resulting implication, but rather the hand that fires and the resulting wound.

Camera angle shifts: now they greet each other, now they exchange hologram IDs. Donghyuck laughs at something Renjun says, Renjun smiles in return. Jump cut: Renjun messages Donghyuck first a few hours later when they both get home. Donghyuck responds, and this time it’s Renjun who chuckles. Fade away, scene cut.

Meeting Renjun is also the exact opposite of meeting Jaemin. Renjun is closed off where Jaemin is an open book, and vice-versa. Meeting Renjun is less memories, more distractions—Renjun is the one that he calls in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep, just to hear his golden voice theorize about aliens and space and everything in the sky that’s been blotted out by the clouds of dust and neon and blood.

One night as Donghyuck is lying in bed and pretending his ceiling doesn’t exist, pretending he can see the sky from here, Renjun confesses that he doesn’t remember many details of his service at all. Tells Donghyuck that he’s blocked out the specific memories, repressed all the individual details.

“It’s more of a feeling,” his phantom projection says as it floats around Donghyuck’s room, “that I get sometimes, this general impending sense of doom. It’s like I’m given the color palette but not the full painting. My dreams are just vague terror, splashes of noise and color and the sensation that something is horribly, horribly wrong.”

(In these moments, Donghyuck wishes that projections were just a little less life-like so that he can stop trying to hug ghosts.)

—

Some Things Are Just Inescapable, Exhibit B:

In the ocean of red, Donghyuck is a piece of driftwood, broken off from the ship and flung into the churning waters. Gallons and gallons of crimsons, scarlets, and all the shades in between that never got named because the human eye was never made to care that much, to see that clearly. Because the people at the top weren’t ever made to consider the lives of those deemed dispensable. 

Drowning, however, is a phenomenon that doesn’t discriminate. Privates and majors and generals alike all get caught up in the undertow and swept away. The waters dictate that no one can fight the tide here, no matter how good of a swimmer they may be. Donghyuck is no exception. Donghyuck’s legs are swept out and away from underneath of him, carrying him far into the sea and miles away from shore. Donghyuck is floating through gallons and gallons of saltwater. Donghyuck is soaked to the bone.

— 

It’s Jaemin’s idea for them to all meet someday. They’re at one of their weekly cafe meetings, the ones where Donghyuck tries hard to put on a show of being perfectly healthy, and he’s in the middle of recapping his week to Jaemin when Renjun’s name pops up. Curiosity piqued at Donghyuck’s frequent mentions of the other, he suggests that the pair go over to Jaemin’s apartment at some point to visit.

“It could be like a sleepover,” he says, excitement apparent in his voice and hands wrapped around his cup of death-coffee as he gives him the signature Na Jaemin look, the one with eyes awfully good at convincing and smile brighter than a flare. “Cute, right?”

“Sure, Jaemin,” Donghyuck says back. His words have an edge of sarcasm tucked into it, but he’s already mentally making note to ask Renjun about it. “Sure.” Jaemin grins at him.

“Guess it’s a date then.”

—

“So you’re certain that I won’t get, like, murdered brutally? That this isn’t some sort of sick way of getting me to pay for any hypothetical war crimes?” Renjun says as they’re on the elevator up to Jaemin’s apartment.

Although initially wary, he’d given in without much of a fight when had Donghyuck messaged him with Jaemin’s request. It’s a strange feeling, knowing that Donghyuck’s two worlds are about to collide head-on, but he thinks that Renjun will be good for Jaemin, and vice-versa. As long as this first meeting goes well.

Donghyuck laughs. “What kind of war crimes would you have even committed?”

“I don’t know! Maybe soldier me was an asshole!” Donghyuck laughs again, amused at Renjun’s nervousness, but he finds his hand and squeezes it anyways in reassurance.

“You’ll be fine, Injunnie. I promise.”

— 

“You’ll be fine,” Donghyuck says as he’s knelt over Mark, needle held in cold, deathly hands. “Just, hold still for a second. You’ll be fine.” _You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine._ He repeats it like a mantra, like a prayer, like he’s so much more powerful than he actually is and can simply speak it into existence. Mark shudders from underneath him, his body divided into two incompatible halves as one fights the other for survival. 

The direct effect of tampering with the human body to perfect it for fighting is that the weapons must be refined simultaneously. The direct effect of humans configuring themselves to outheal normal bullet wounds is that as a result, the bullet can no longer just be a piece of fast-flying metal. Now the bullet striking and entering the flesh is just the beginning of the story. Now the body trying to recover inadvertently kills itself in the process.

(Intention, fulfilled by implication.)

Donghyuck finds out about all of this after the fact. As always. It doesn’t really make a difference, it’s not like he would have been any more equipped to help Mark if he’d known the mechanics of what was happening, if he’d known that his body was being turned against itself. It’s not like he could have saved Mark, as unprepared as he was. When the other side of the equation has too many unknown variables, it becomes impossible to find the solution without prior knowledge. Donghyuck is aware of this. Donghyuck still can’t help the idea that it’s his fault.

Mark is the most capable soldier he’s ever met. Mark is championed as the golden boy from day one. Mark is the finest example of the capabilities of technological advancement out there, Mark is the one that barely flinches when given the serum, Mark is, Mark is, Mark is— 

Mark is.

Mark is now nothing but a collection of charred ashes, drifting endlessly at sea.

— 

Renjun’s worries end up being unfounded, as apparently something about him activates some dormant mothering instinct in Jaemin when they meet. Almost directly after the door opens and Donghyuck introduces the two, a protective look registers in Jaemin’s eyes. Donghyuck notices it as he fawns over the pair’s still linked hands, as he ushers the two into his flat and sits them down in the living room before going to find refreshments.

It’s an intriguing experience, watching someone actively recalibrate themselves in the presence of another. On the other side, Renjun initially seems hesitant to Jaemin’s ministrations—giving brief, pointed responses to anything he asks and generally stilting the course of the conversation. It’s the sharper side of Renjun, the one that’d met Donghyuck’s eyes back in the supermarket and dared him to make the first move, the one that’s diamond-cut and made to be a shield.

Watching the two speak is watching two lines intersect at odd angles: they’re not doomed for failure per se, but it’s not the type of relationship that will immediately lean into clean formations, into perpendicularity.

Eventually though, the two wear each other out, Renjun mellowing into a mostly accurate copy of what he is to Donghyuck and Jaemin giving him room to breathe.

Internally, Donghyuck relaxes. They’ll be okay.

They end up sitting around and making small-talk for a while, trading basic information like how they met each other and what they do for a living. It’s not unpleasant per say, but it feels forced, and eventually Jaemin grows restless and drags Renjun and Donghyuck up onto the rooftop of his building.

“There’s a reason why I paid so much extra for the penthouse suite, you know,” he says as he leads the pair to a set of stairs opening up to a dark hallway, “I feel like we spend so much of our lives just suffocating right? Suffocating as we’re stuck in our own seperate little orbits, put in quarantine by our jobs and our pasts and even our own thoughts. We spend so much time trapped that it’s nice to get some space every once in a while.”

They reach an old-fashioned door, one that opens with a simple lock and key instead of fingerprints, and Jaemin swiftly pushes the door open. And into the night they step, hoping that the air will do them a favor.

(It’s just as littered with dust and toxins and _who-knows-what_ as inside, but sometimes it’s not about the object but rather the framing, the perspective.)

—

Here’s a moment of honesty: Donghyuck is utterly obsessed with the idea of mortality.

As a kid, he bid goodnight to everything—from the moon to the curtains to the toy robot he loved—because no one had taught him what dead meant yet. 

He knows what it means now. Probably. It’s one of those things that worms its way into routine, one of those things that seems to carve itself into your very being. The type that runs parallel to the head as it processes, moving in tandem with everyday ideas.

Here’s another: the more times you carve into something, the deeper the groove becomes. The easier it is to get stuck in it.

(Rabbit holes.)

Donghyuck remembers reading once about old coal mines. How the miners would use canaries to warn themselves of dangerous gasses, back when birds weren’t so rare and technology wasn’t so far along and coal was still there to mine.The singing canary says that you’re safe. The silent canary says that you’re in danger. The dead canary says that you’re too late.

All of his canaries are mute and half-dead. It doesn't matter though, because Donghyuck is deaf anyways.

Feathers have ended up everywhere in this landscape; one bird after another falls into the ditch. The rut has gravity—it draws the animals in and then spits them back out again. Donghyuck really needs to just bury the fucking body, fill in the hole, but he can’t bring himself to do it because he’s weak and bitter and mourning. And it doesn’t matter, remember?

— 

It becomes a sort of tradition—Donghyuck meets up with Renjun every week, and together they walk to Jaemin’s apartment to spend the night. After the first three times, they both take to leaving a toothbrush and a set of pajamas there, to which Jaemin beams at.

Somewhere along the line, Jaemin introduces them to Jeno and starts dragging him to all of their get-togethers. Donghyuck goes with it, as he’s learned to do with anything Jaemin does. Jeno fits in remarkably well anyways, quiet but supportive, kind and impossible to hate, and Donghyuck knows that there’s more to the good-natured boy than either Jaemin or Jeno let on. 

He sees it in how sometimes he catches Jaemin giving Jeno worried looks, how he checks in with him periodically during certain conversations. He knows that Jaemin wouldn’t disturb their ritual without good reason, not when he’s aware that Renjun likes his patterns, likes his repetition.

Most nights, they end up on the rooftop. When it gets colder, Jaemin takes to bringing blankets up with them as they all huddle close under the pretense of sharing body heat. Sometimes they talk about odd things—Renjun regals them with stories of stars and how _exaterrestrial life most certainly exists, fuck you very much_ , or Jeno rambles on about his three cats in the most endearing way. Sometimes they get drunk and laugh at anything that comes to mind. And sometimes, for light naturally casts shadows, the conversation takes a heavier turn.

They’re lying there underneath a murky sky one day, starfish limbs sprawled across the blanket that’s been laid out on top of the concrete, and they’re suspended in silence until Jaemin speaks.

“You know, me moving here was on a complete and utter whim.” His voice is light, trying to seem nonchalant, but it’s a sharp turn from before, when they’d been playfully discussing constellations, pulling up pictures and trying to make out shapes from nonsense. And try as he may to hide it, Jaemin sounds to Donghyuck like he’s had this on his mind for a while, and the three of them turn their attention to him.

“I went back to my old house, and it was fine, my family’s lovely, it was fine. But there was just, just something inside of me, like this weird itch,” he confides, “telling me that this isn’t home for me anymore. Telling me to get out, to find somewhere that I actually belong.” 

He wrinkles his nose, reliving the memories, reliving the feeling that had settled deep in his soul. “So I ran away, got as far away from there as possible. Ran all the way here to this tiny apartment in this fucking place. For the longest time, it was just like, I don’t know, like I went from one tiny cage to another.”

Donghyuck moves to speak, but Jaemin stops him. “And then I met you three,” he says, small, hopeful smile in place. “And I’m not saying that I’m completely fixed now, but you guys make it better. So thank you.”

(Sometimes it’s not about the object but rather the framing, the perspective.)

There’s a beat of silence after this, and then an “oh, _Jaemin,_ ” from Jeno as they all collectively move closer to him. Jaemin laughs, a slightly strangled sort of sound, and says that he’s fine, but accepts their comfort anyways. Maybe it’s enough, maybe it’s not, but it’s all they have these days. So it’ll do.

—

_What have you done for your country?_ screamsthe leftover war propaganda that Donghyuck finds one day, kicked into a corner in its disuse.

Well. The human body on average holds one-point-two to one-point-five gallons of blood. Multiply that by all the people he’s killed over the course of his service, that’s gotta get them somewhere. 

Ignorant army pitted against ignorant army, the nature of war presents many opportunities to contribute to the cause. Congregations of men coupled with no shortage of adequate intent implies bloodshed. In history courses, they used to tell stories of ancient civilizations that would spill it as sacrifice, soak the earth in red. To give back to the gods. 

Donghyuck believes that the gods will be sated for years to come.

—

Eventually— _inevitably_ —they all move into Jaemin’s apartment. Jeno is first, his cats suddenly appearing one day with no further ceremony, and Renjun and Donghyuck are quick to follow suit. 

It feels like a new page. It’s not perfect— _they’re_ not perfect. Not by a long shot.

It’s cramped because the apartment was never made for four; the apartment was made for loneliness, the way so many things are made these days. But they make it work. And the world’s still kinda a shitty place, and the four of them still kinda are messed up, together or apart. For evidence of the former, one only has to look at the war aftermath. For evidence of the latter?

Well, here’s the thing: they’re a set of rhyming quadruplets sometimes. And the nature of the rhyme is going back upon itself—for the second line can’t rhyme without the backwards existence of the first, the third line without the second, and so on and so forth. _Do you see?_ It’s a cyclical, circuitous thing. Tripping and stumbling over itself. One switches its tune, the rest fall back with it, one gets stuck in the past, the rest sink to match.

This is what Donghyuck eventually comes to associate with progress. Bad days, good days, worse days. A non-linear path of healing, laced with recurring trauma. This is how he learns the process of navigating Renjun, Jeno, and Jaemin. 

At times it’s second nature: something just clicks between them, everything runs in sync. Like breathing together—the timed inhale, the resulting exhale. These three people become his tether, his living reminder of how to be human. Other times, it’s not so easy: they tiptoe around it, but they can all be fucking _volatile_ when it comes to being provoked. When the defense mechanisms kick in, he learns just how cruel Renjun can be, how closed off Jaemin grows, how quiet Jeno becomes.

It’s an asterisk type situation. Everything is a bed of tulips; everything is a bed of tulips, until: glass shattering, timers going off. Phones ringing. People swarming. It’s a paradise that's riddled with caveats, but they make it work.

—

War is a memory art. War is a painting of a field riddled with rabbit holes to wander down. 

Tonight, Jeno asks to be reminded that he’s real, with his voice trembling, hands trembling. “ _Please_ ,” he says, “I just, I can’t. I can’t seem to escape my own thoughts; I can’t seem to find my way out. Please _._ ” A stumbling tongue, clumsy and childish, trying to open up the demands of the head, the cravings of the body. A tongue, pink and raw, falling in between the gaps of breath, trying to save the mind from itself.

Jeno quivers.

(Donghyuck learned during boot camp that quiver actually has two different meanings—the first one is a verb that deals with shaking, with movement; the second one is a noun that refers to a container for an arrow, for a method to kill. They have two completely different etymologies, yet ended up compounded into one label. Funny, isn’t it?)

Jaemin moves first, circling his arms around Jeno’s waist and pulling him in. “You’re ok, dear ,” he says gently, “you’re here now. We’ve got you.” Renjun and Donghyuck follow, and Jeno ends up cradled between the three of them.

"Focus on me—on us," says Donghyuck. Jeno shudders and closes his eyes. His head is tilted up towards the sky, the faint light gracing his features, and under different circumstances Donghyuck would love to take a moment and worship, but now isn’t the time.

(In another time however? In a different world? Donghyuck would happily follow in the steps of a pagan god. But that’s a story for another day.)

"Tell me, tell me something, anything. Tell me anything nice. Please?" breathes Jeno, sweetly, innocently. His hands have found their way to lace with Donghyuck's, and he can feel the wiry grip of Jeno’s fingers pressing into his own.

Renjun cups Jeno’s face with his hands. "Well, one of my sisters is getting married in a few months to the love of her life," he tells him with a quiet smile. “She told me to invite you guys to the wedding."

Recognition slowly turns over in Jeno’s eyes. "Yiren right?” he hums. "That’s good. Yes, that’s nice, I’m happy for her. Will you give her my congratulations?"

"Yeah, of course Jeno. Anything for you." Renjun punctuates his promise by giving Jeno a brief kiss on the forehead, and he slowly relaxes, opens up softly. Like he’s being rebuilt again.

"Thank you."

Later that night, when the others have gone to sleep and there’s only the sky to bear witness, Donghyuck alone remains on the rooftop. He mirrors Jeno’s earlier position, face angled up towards the apertures of heaven and eyes squeezed shut. And he sinks to his knees to pray to every deity out there to let him keep this, let him stay with these people. 

_I'll be good_ , he promises, _I'll be a better man today, I swear._

He’s not much of a religious man, but he hopes he’ll be lucky for once. He hopes that the universe will allow him this one thing.

— 

Donghyuck lies in the trench, silent. Cracked, muddy lips pressed together in a prayer for stillness, for reprise. Lips pressed together as he pleads.

He doesn't think God likes him very much as distant shouting is heard, tell-tale marks of danger. _Shit._ He steadies himself, braces for impact. Puts on his mask. But it's no use, because this time someone lobs a napalm into their trench, and they all end up drenched in flames. No mask will save any of them here.

He hears shrieking around him, mixed in with curses. Someone calls out for God to help them, and Donghyuck almost laughs. _I tried that, it doesn't work,_ he wants to say. _Isn’t the fire enough indication that there is no God for us here? That all we have now is our own bodies?_

He keeps his mouth shut though. Because there's a rule out here: you let people cope however they need to when they're constantly teetering on the verge of dying. And he’s not about to tread on that.

Mark appears beside him and grabs his arm, breaking his daze. "Donghyuck, there you are, thank God. What are you doing?" he says as he guides him away from the smoldering bodies. "We need to get out of here."

Donghyuck startles slightly. "Get out? Shouldn't we, shouldn't we fight back?"

Mark shakes his head grimly. "Not this time, we’re far too outnumbered. We'd be doomed to lose."

"Fuck. How did that even happen? I thought we were waiting for them?"

"Ambush we think. We were set up, it was a trap."

“A trap?” Donghyuck echoes as they near the vehicles they’d arrived in.

Something stony, something hard and vengeful sets into Mark’s expression as he speaks. “There’s too many of them. There’s no way they couldn’t have known we were going to be here, no way they weren’t staking this place out beforehand.”

Donghyuck opens his mouth, brain still struggling to process what’s going on, but he’s stopped abruptly when he sees it.

Like a car crash, it happens slowly and then all at once. Donghyuck knows it’s coming from miles away as time seems to dilate in his eyes, but at the same instant everything moves far too fast for him to do anything. Time becomes a rubber band, stretching and stretching until it’s forced to snap back as the sound of metal piercing metal is heard. And then chaos ensues.

Mark Lee falls right in front of Donghyuck’s own eyes. All the years of being exposed to fear gas can’t amount to shit anymore when he feels the oxygen get ripped straight from his chest.

— 

Donghyuck has never been much of a religious man. Donghyuck has never been much of a religious man. Donghyuck— 

Donghyuck is lying to himself.

Donghyuck was born and raised in a family as devoted as they came. A family of believers, of the Lord's people. He grows up the type of boy to go to church on Sundays, learning the words of salvation that will save him when he dies.

Until.

When Donghyuck is sixteen, he kisses another boy for the first time. It's done with someone that he knows from church in secret, behind doors that still function under lock and key and bolt, and it's a rash decision on both of their parts. They never talk about it again, held to unspoken agreements of _both of our families will kill us if they find out_ , but it crawls into Donghyuck's mind to plague him anyways.

And it runs and runs in his head. A broken record, wailing _wrong wrong wrong_ on loop. Match striking the matchbox, over and over again. He’s posed right next to the lighter, and he’s been dropped into a vat full of kerosene. And it turns into this: Donghyuck learns, long before any wars, what it feels like to be burned alive. Donghyuck learns what it means to be a sinner, what it means to be combustible.

It’s the sort of secret that’s slippery, the sort that teases at the edges of his teeth in moments of silence. He’ll be sitting in the backseat of their car as the streets blur across the windows, nothing but the muted sounds of the radio filling in the space, and the words will creep up to him: _I like boys. I like boys, and I’m sorry._ He practices forming the phrase in his mouth sometimes, saying it to anything that’ll listen: paint on the walls, blinds on the window. Never to anyone who might understand, he battles hard to keep it down. 

But finally, he gives in one day because he was never meant for fighting. He was never meant for fighting.

He tells his parents. 

Match striking the matchbox again, he’s met with blinding-white anger, with the crushing weight of disappointment, gasoline flooding into his system with every word. A few days later, Donghyuck, freshly turned eighteen, moves out.

When the war finally comes, the one everyone knew was going to happen sooner or later, he finds himself enlisting with no second thought. It’s one type of prison to another, but remember the argument of object versus frame.

(And of course, we all know what war does to him.)

— 

From the moment they step onto the field, Donghyuck has a twisting feeling in his gut, warning him that something’s wrong. And he's proven right when the entire battle plays out catastrophically.

Half of their unit is hit with a gas bomb from the start, easily ruining the numbers advantage they'd been relying on to win. The other half, Mark and Donghyuck included, are left scrambling—one entire side rendered useless and easily open for attack. _Fuck._

After already starting out at such a severe disadvantage, Donghyuck figures that their squadron commander will cut their losses and retreat. It’s only logical at this point, but Donghyuck forgets to factor in the fact that their squadron commander is also _a goddamn idiot_.

A bark of "keep pushing forward!" crackles through Donghyuck's earpiece, and as much as he disagrees with the decision, he was taught to never disobey direct orders. So he tightens his grip on his gun, secures his gas mask, and he does what he's told.

But no matter how valiantly they fight, no matter how well they follow orders, their unit quickly falls apart. Flashes of red start to stain Donghyuck's vision as they sink themselves deeper and deeper into trouble. His in-ear won't stop shrieking in alarm as one soldier after another falls. The battlefield is littered with bodies, and the chances of Donghyuck’s unit making it out of here are terribly bleak.

Only a miracle can save them now.

Donghyuck looks to Mark, wanting to see his face at least one more time before he dies, only to find Mark staring into the distance, eyes narrowed in careful calculation.

"Mark," he tries to scream over the sounds of fighting, "Mark, what the hell are you looking at?"

"There's an opening in their defense line," Mark yells back, "if I can just slip through. God, I might be able to save our asses."

Donghyuck follows Mark’s gaze to where he’s talking about and _shit,_ he’s right. He’s right, someone could make it through to the other side, but doing so would essentially be a suicide mission.

“You’re fucking insane.”

“I have to do it; it’s our only shot.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed!”

“If I don’t do this, Commander Park is going to get us _all_ killed.” Mark turns away from Donghyuck, tears out his in-ear, and ducks away into the chaos. Donghyuck is left gaping after him.

He pulls himself together after a moment, falling back on pure muscle memory to continue functioning as a proper soldier. Find a target, take aim, fire. _Mark’s going to die._ Reload, rinse and repeat. _Mark’s going to die. My god, Mark’s going to die._ Empty out one cartridge after another until— 

An explosion resonates through the field, followed by rippling chaos within enemy lines. Donghyuck’s side and the opposing now stand on an even playing ground—Mark’s succeeded; the only question now is whether or not he’ll make it out alive.

— 

“What the hell was _that_ out there,” Donghyuck says in lieu of a greeting as he slams his tray down on the table and sits down. From where he’s sat next to him, Mark winces.

After the stunt he pulled on the battlefield, he’d managed to walk out mostly unharmed—needing to only stay in the infirmary for a few hours and making it out in time for dinner. But the praise remains: whispers of how _Mark Lee’s done it again_ and _this is why he’s called the prodigy_ float around the entire camp.

Donghyuck has to resist the urge to tell them that the only reason why Mark made it out alive was because of pure coincidence. That Mark’s escape was only because of the sudden falling of a piece of debris, conveniently covering his position. That without that freak accident, Mark would be just another one of the dead.

But once again, you let people believe whatever they want to believe when they’re on the verge of dying.

“Hello to you too, Donghyuck. No ‘welcome back’? No ‘I’m glad you’re alive’?” Mark says back.

Donghyuck glares at him. “You and I both know that if you were any less fortunate, you’d be dead. You don’t always need to be the hero, Mark.”

Mark frowns in response. “If I hadn’t gone for it, we’d both be dead. Wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now since Park’s absolutely incompetent.”

Donghyuck continues glaring for a few moments before letting out a sigh and deflating. “I know, Mark I just,” Donghyuck pauses for a second, makes eye contact. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you, okay?”

Mark rolls his eyes, but smiles begrudgingly. “Okay, fine. I’ll promise to be more careful next time, but only if you do the same.”

“Good.”

—

Donghyuck sits at his kitchen counter, staring at the projection displaying his outgoing call. The ringing sounds tinny in his ears despite technology having come so far, and it only serves to worsen his rising anxiety.

His fingers find themselves tapping a mindless rhythm on the table beside him as he waits for his mother to pick up. Part of him hopes that she won’t, that he’ll walk away slightly letdown but without the bludgeoning weight of rejection nonetheless. But another part of him, naive and desperate, longs for forgiveness, for acceptance.

The call connects.

His mother’s face clicks into focus in front of him. There’s an immediate and irrational urge that longs to reach out to her, a knee-jerk reaction that forgets the fact that she’s a meer projection. He quells it down, reminding himself that in this apartment, he is the only living being here.

“Mom.” 

Her face softens, almost imperceivable to anyone who hasn’t spent hours studying her expressions, from how she sticks out her tongue when she bakes to how she furrows her brows when she drives.

“Hyuckie. How are—how are you?” 

Donghyuck breathes, in three counts and out three more—the same way she’d showed him when he was little. “I’m alright, I . . . I got discharged a few months ago.”

“Oh, right, I’m glad you made it home safe.” He gives a crooked little smile, and he’s sure that his mother sees through it easily, but she lets it go.

“Yeah, me too.”

This is how their conversation flows: it’s full of stutters and lulls, but it stumbles along regardless. Donghyuck’s mother talks about his father, his business, their neighbors, and Donghyuck responds with non-committal remarks. Eventually, they fall into some semblance of a rhythm, playing a lopsided game of catch-up. Donghyuck allows himself to admit that it’s nice, that he’s missed talking with his family.

They can only play the game of circling the matter for so long though, and eventually his mother decides to bite the bullet and bring it up.

“Hyuckie. Have you . . . met anyone? A nice girl to settle down with maybe?” Her words are halting, as if she knows that she’s aiming a gun straight at the target and pulling the trigger with all her might. Donghyuck tenses.

“No, Mom, I haven’t.” Donghyuck doesn’t have to be a master at reading his mother to see the way her face falls at this.

“So you’re still, still—”

“Yes Mom, I’m still gay. Always have been, always will be.”

“Ah. I see. I’d have thought that things might’ve been different, that the war might’ve knocked some sense into you.” _Oh._

_Oh, okay. Take aim and fire then. Shoot and hit a bullseye._

Donghyuck is whisked back to his seventeen year old body, watching his mother stare at him in disbelief after he bares his soul to her. He blinks, once, twice, does the breathing trick. It doesn’t work so well this time.

There are so many words that all threaten to burst from him, comments about how _even if I was straight, there’s no way I could be in a relationship right now, not with how I can't even get out of bed most days_ ;and _the worst part is that in every other aspect you’re the most supportive person in my life, why can’t you just forgive me for this one thing_ ; and _I just want to be loved, I just want to be loved again_. But none of it comes out.

“Well, the war didn’t. I’m sorry Mom, I’m sorry,” he says instead.

He forces himself to hang up. _In for three._

He feels the room fill with static. _And out for three._

He decides to go back to bed. _That’s it, my boy, you’re doing so well._

—

When they get him to report on Mark’s death, trying to desperately to figure out how the hell _Mark Lee the prodigy_ had been killed by a simple bullet, he tells them that they’d been making their way back to the escape pods before it had happened. He recounts how he’d fallen in an instant. And he talks about how none of the drugs Donghyuck stuck in him could stop Mark from dying.

There’s one part he leaves out.

As Donghyuck perches above Mark, fumbling with useless needles, Mark suddenly speaks, asking him in a raspy voice to stop.

“Donghyuck,” he says weakly, seemingly using the last of his strength to get his last words out, “Donghyuck I need to tell you something before I go. Donghyuck—”

“What? What, no,” Donghyuck cries, “you’re not going. You’re not dying on me, Mark Lee, you promised remember?”

“Donghyuck, please, I need to say this. Hyuckie, I need to tell you that I love you. I love you.”

_I love you? Oh._

Donghyuck feels lightheaded. Mark is the one in front of him, bleeding out, but Donghyuck is the one that feels like he’s been shot instead.

It’s something they’d been dancing around for ages. Something that’d been present ever since Mark walked him through how to put a gun together, and Donghyuck had saved him a seat during dinner in return. Something that’d always been circling at the edges of their interactions together.

But it’s also something they never dared talked about, because if a soldier who thinks is dangerous, a soldier who falls in love may as well be an enemy. A soldier who is foolish enough to fall in love is be detrimental enough to cost them an entire war.

(Somehow, Donghyuck always ends up the fool.)

Yet here Mark is, wasting his dying breaths on this, and Donghyuck can’t seem to think, can’t seem to clear the buzzing that’s filling his head.

“You, what, that’s not fair Mark, you can’t tell me this now when you’re, when—”

Mark smiles, pained, gorgeous, and through a mouthful of blood he says, “I love you Hyuck. I’m sorry we had to end up like this, I’m sorry I couldn’t give you better.”

And then he’s gone.

—

Grief is a terribly curious thing. Sometimes, he’s ready to let go, content with meeting Mark on the other side when his own time comes. It’s at these moments where he allows himself to dwell on the past the most: war had been absolute hell, and no stolen moment with Mark could remedy that, but Donghyuck likes to pretend every once in awhile that they’d met under better circumstances, in a nicer universe, that their story was set elsewhere.

And then other times, it’s like Mark’s dying out right in front of him all over again. His own mind is mutinous in these instances, and in its rebellion it reenacts the moment again and again, tearing the wound fresh each time.

(He never said it back. God, he let Mark die, and he never said it back.)

—

Donghyuck is eight years old when it’s announced: they’re starting a new mission, sending people into space again, trying to expand mankind’s touch out even further. Atlas, they call the project, for the Greek Titan who holds the celestial heavens on his shoulders, for the acknowledgement of the crushing weight of exploration.

He’s tucked in between his mother and father as they sit in front of their television watching the broadcast of the take-off. Donghyuck mouths the countdown in time with the robotic voice that comes in through the soundchip in his ear as he stares wide-eyed at the gathering plumes of smoke, at the architecture carving out the vehicle, the vehicle carving out the sky.

The trip is one that’s going to take decades, one tiny spacecraft matched up against one infinity after another. Time is a price that must be paid to breach beyond the barriers of earthly confinements, to unearth the stars again from where they’ve been erased by a man-made cocoon of light.

About ten years into that trip, there will be no way to reach the shuttle anymore once its bounded past the reach of current technology. It will send its last report, and then it will blink out of existence—if existence is counted as only the things we can measure, things we can bottle up in certainty.

Temporarily.

At eight though, he doesn’t think about this, he only marvels at the grandness of its scale, he only fall a bit in love with the idea of space.

The space shuttle escapes the grasp of human observation almost one year before war is declared. When it finally makes its return, the people aboard will become a living time capsule, jutting out from the rest of a society with war at its epicenter. A control in the experiment of the human capability to destroy.

Donghyuck wonders sometimes what these people, filled with starlight and galaxies, filled with the sand in suspended hourglasses, will make of the world when they come back.

—

Grief is a terribly curious thing.

For a demonstration?

It’s two am, and almost no one is on the little automated bus that constantly circles the city, save for the old lady that always seems to be sleeping in a corner and a few druggies that find reprise in the sheltered movement.

Donghyuck is gazing out through the window in front of him, legs jittering on the seats out of habit, legs promising the ability to jump into motion at any given second. He’s sitting there, and he’s making out patterns in the smattering of raindrops on the glass when Mark appears in front of him in an instant, bright-eyed and fleshed-out and colored-in and alive.

_Hand hovering over the trigger: it pulls._

Donghyuck is not stupid. Donghyuck was taught how to read the life-monitors accurately, Donghyuck knows Mark is dead—just like he knows that the war ended four months, two weeks, and three days ago, just like he knows that he’s no longer welcome home.

He knows that he’s gone, but Mark’s face in front of him is real; he swears to it: from the prominent cheekbones to the cut of his jaw to his _goddamn smile_. Always that smile.

(Donghyuck really needs to stop trying to hug ghosts.)

When prey is being hunted, it will either try to run or try to fight back, depending on how it perceives its own strength in relation to the predator. Donghyuck pushes the stop button and steps off the bus in the middle of nowhere. He walks the rest of the way home.

—

Light streaming in through the windows on a cool Sunday morning, he finds Jaemin in the living room, staring at his hands.

“Donghyuck,” he says without looking up, “can you come here for a second?”

"Sure,” Donghyuck responds as he sets down the glass in his hands and walks over to sit next to Jaemin, “do you need something?”

"Do me a favor, dear. I—this might sound strange, but can you give my hands a massage? They’re just not feeling very cooperative today," Jaemin's fingers twitch sporadically as he speaks, moving in a series of tiny bursts of motion before jerking to a stop.

"Oh. Of course Jaemin," Donghyuck says. He reaches for Jaemin's left hand, the one that still has feeling left in it, but he's stopped by Jaemin clearing his throat and gesturing to his other hand.

"Both of them.” Jaemin says, and then blinks a few times. “I know it's not really there anymore, but I can still feel it, I swear. Phantom limbs and all that, right?" he finishes in a small voice.

 _Oh._ Donghyuck remembers this, remembers Jaemin telling them about before they’d gotten him the necessary prosthetics: how he’d continuously try to reach for cups and utensils with empty space. How pain would shoot through his legs sometimes, but when he went to report it he remembered that he didn’t _have_ legs anymore.

With a nod, Donghyuck starts rubbing circles into both of Jaemin's palms as the other relaxes in front of him.

"I just, I know that it's nothing but a chunk of metal at the end of my arm now, but it still feels like it's, like it’s me? Right?” He pauses, takes a deep breath. “And no matter how much I tell myself that it's not the same hand, I just can't get rid of the smell of rust. I don't know why, Donghyuck, I don't know, but I can’t get rid of it."

As he continues tracing patterns into Jaemin’s skin, Donghyuck thinks of the war, of sharp cheekbones and bouts of laughter. Donghyuck thinks of the time after he'd walked home in the rain, where he'd found himself curled up on the couch and babbling Happy Birthday to no one, the only thing he'd ever learnt in Mark's native tongue.

"I don’t know either, Jaemin.”

—

Some Things Are Just Inescapable, Exhibit C:

It's officially been two years since the enemy had surrendered and peace was finally declared. Almost two years since Donghyuck had been discharged. It’s not something he’d forget easily, but the daily calendar that greets him every time he checks his hologram reminds him to save the date in big, bold letters anyways.

They've decided to celebrate the occasion with fireworks. After all, what better way to commemorate a generation raised on war than to pierce them with a quick shot of nostalgia?

Donghyuck is asleep when it starts, on the left side of the bed. At the very right is Renjun, with Jeno and Jaemin sandwiched in the middle. A dim lamp glows on the nightstand beside them, Jaemin having bought it after Jeno confessed one day that he can't stand the dark.

He's woken from his sleep by Renjun shaking him awake.

"Huh—" he starts, mouth still too woolen and thoughts too milky and sleep-addled to translate into coherency, but he's shushed by Renjun.

"Not too loud, they'll come for you if they find you."

 _Boom_ goes the sky, ripping itself apart.

Donghyuck winces. "Who? Who'll come?"

Renjun furrows his brows at this. "Don't know. Does it matter? We need to go, we need to hide. It's not safe here."

Donghyuck tries to collect himself, tries to figure out how to get Renjun back to sleep, but Renjun grows too impatient for him to respond and grabs his wrists instead, dragging him up and out of bed and onto his feet.

Another firework goes off, and the resulting flash briefly shades Renjun's face bright red. His eyes are blown wide-open, but his voice is calm, oddly impassive. Donghyuck lets Renjun lead him into the closet and maneuver him until Donghyuck's back is pressed into Renjun's chest.

Through the crack of light breaching into the bedroom, Donghyuck watches as the rest of the room explodes in color, violets and oranges and greens bursting into sight before fizzling out. The sky above them cracks itself open, over and over again in moments of shattered glass and fractured bones.

Renjun runs a hand through Donghyuck's hair as he mumbles to himself. Over the sounds of man-made thunder, Donghyuck catches the tail-ends of "— _worry,_ _going to be okay"_ and " _glad you're—"_ and " _thankful I got to you in—"._

Little glances into Renjun, viewing ports for the other.

When prey is being hunted, it will either try to run or try to fight back, depending on how it perceives its own strength in relation to the predator—unless it’s got a cause worth retaliating for. Food, shelter, offspring: personal motive is one of the greatest generators of exception.

They end up falling asleep like that, crammed together in the rabbit hole. When Jeno finds them the next day, Donghyuck exchanges a pointed glance with him, and they leave it be.

—

Moving on is a curious thing. One thing falls into another, crisply intersecting and leading to patterns that never should’ve been conceived. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though: if war is an art, it’s not the only type of art. Patterns can be the foundation of paintings as well.

"Pathetic isn't it?" he poses to Renjun, Jaemin, and Jeno one day, months and months after the conversation with his mother. "Like, a whole-ass war went on, I could spend fifty bucks right now and turn my entire body into a shitty power generator, and my parents still focus in on what's in the pants of who I want to fuck." He laughs, crude and raw, and he feels himself being taken apart. He feels himself disintegrating.

The call replays in his head, the absolute disappointment etching her face flickering in front of him like a ghost. And then Mark’s face floats in front of him, lovely and twisted. They both shriek at him, telling him that he’s not capable of being loved, that he’s not good enough.

But this time around, it’s not a cycle; this time around he has people to stop his fall. Three pairs of arms surround him, ready to catch him before he hits the ground.

“It’s okay Donghyuck, it’s okay,” Renjun says— 

“We’ve got you,” Jeno continues— 

“We love you, more than anything Lee Donghyuck. You are not wrong, you are allowed to love anyone you want. You deserve to love, and you deserve to be loved,” Jaemin finishes.

Through the course of language as it progresses, words accumulate weight. Words accumulate connotations as they’re exchanged, as they’re recorded. _Love_ is a word that’s become a fault line for Donghyuck, and in the process of excavating his soul, love is a word that will fissure him. His first reaction, one that’s been programmed into him through an excess of moments of being left alone with his own thoughts, is that he’s not worthy, that he’s gay and wrong and has the blood of far too many people on his hands. His first reaction is that he doesn’t deserve a second chance.

But Renjun, Jeno, and Jaemin hold him through this too as he breathes, and he tells himself that this isn’t the boy he kissed behind closed doors, this is different. This isn’t a fleeting moment with Mark, this is something more permanent, more tangible. Maybe he and Mark were always meant to be only tangential, but this will stay with him. With the three people he loves most beside him, Donghyuck learns that setting a man on fire will keep him warm for the rest of his life. 

And oh, what a pleasure it is to burn.

—

“Did you hear the news?” asks Jeno. They’re settled on the rooftop, falling back into the comfort of routine, and they’re perched nicely in their own private orbit, staring out at the faint blaze of night-life.

At their replies voicing that they did not, in fact, hear the news, Jeno continues, “They’re building a memorial at the capital. For the war veterans.” A beat, and then he adds, “for us, I suppose.” He tacks on a small laugh at the end for good measure: a small flutter of his voice, not entirely joy-filled, but also void of an overwhelming dosage of bitterness. A delve into a gray area, acknowledging the constant of tragedy in lifelines such as theirs while simultaneously reminding the world that _they’re still here._

Cheekbones and laughter, bright-eyes and selflessness. A figure hovering over Donghyuck, stubbornness still apparent postmortem. _I’ll be okay,_ reassures Donghyuck silently, _I’m in good hands now._

He shifts in closer to the others, puts his arm around Jeno who’s nearest to him. “I’ve always wanted to visit the capitol,” he says softly, “ever since I was a kid.”

“Well then, let’s go when construction’s finished. All four of us, we can make a whole outing from it,” says Jaemin from where he’s sat between Renjun and Jeno. “It’s only, what, an hour or two away?”

Donghyuck smiles. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

— 

Donghyuck kneels in front of the name carved into granite. It’s a quiet, unassuming scrawl, indistinguishable from the thousands of others that surround it, the only significance stemming from what the individual letters spell out when put together. _Lee Minhyung_ , printed on without much flourish.

“Mark. Hey. It’s been a while, hm?” Donghyuck pauses, letting Mark’s presence fill in the space around him.

“Yeah, I know, I’m taking care of myself. I made a promise remember? And I’m a man of my word.”

A few feet away from him, Jaemin has his hand pressed against the stone, mumbling under his breath. Jeno is with Renjun somewhere further along the wall, holding hands and reading the names one by one.

“I’m ready to let go now. I’ll see you on the other side, I swear, but right now I think that I’ll be fine. You don’t have to worry anymore, we’ve both had enough worrying for a lifetime.”

Donghyuck smiles.

“Goodbye Mark. I love you.”

— 

In an undetermined number of years, the first trial run of Project Atlas will circle back to Earth—will circle back into the clutches of gravity and civilization and all of their implications. It will bring back people with no knowledge of the war, people who may as well be time-travelers, people from the past who have no choice but to collide with the new present.

A collision, however, is a two-way street. A collision is also a conversation.

Donghyuck would like them to know that in the time of their absence, he’s survived. He’s survived, and he’s learnt to move on, and he’s learnt to respect himself for doing so.

He’s learnt a lot in the past few years.

Some things are inescapable, but sometimes it’s not necessarily about escaping. Sometimes it’s being aware of the existence of the hunter, but choosing to live anyways.

It’s a marbled street, setbacks blurring into and merging with victories. A winding, circuitous path, spiraling from point to point, from high to low. But the spiral is only made a spiral in its dimension—flatten out a spiral and all you get is a circle, a swirl.

Only in the expansion, in the act of going forward, is the spiral carried into true form.

In this way, it’s accurate to describe his life as having of spiraled in the past few years. It’s a shaky spiral sometimes—it’s drawn by the human hand afterall, and the human hand is inevitably drawn to error. But in following the path of the lines, in tracing the swoop of the curves, Donghyuck likes to think that he’s alive.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! as always, any kudos, (gentle) criticism, or feedback are greatly appreciated! talk to me in the comments or on my twitter + curious cat below!
> 
> twt: [@nanodarlings](https://twitter.com/nanodarlings)  
> cc: [aphelions](https://curiouscat.me/aphelions)  
> some end of the fic rambling:  
> \- if there are any trigger warnings that i might've missed while tagging, please please please tell me!  
> \- i've been going absolute tunnel-vision mode on this fic since...early november i think? so i really hope that you enjoyed it haha, especially since personally i've reached the point where i've developed the biggest love-hate relationship with it. this fic is my estranged child. i'm so burnt-out from reading and editing it, but at the same time it has all my love.  
> \- this fic i feel like was a big leap outside my comfort zone? very experimental in its style, filled with way more...uh scenes that aren't just pure description than i'm used to writing (read: maybe two scenes before this), and longer than anything i've ever written before. it's pushed my boundaries as a writer as well as revealing a lot of areas where i could improve in. a big...growth fic i suppose? so there's a lot of bits that aren't perfect but. they're baby steps!


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